Dallmeier Electronic, From Casinos to Airports, Hard Drives Are Making a Difference in Fighting Crime

Whether it’s a busy international airport with thousands of passengers making their way through baggage checks or a casino with hundreds of slot machines and gaming tables, the potential for a security breach is enormous.

One high-tech solution that helps make these vulnerable environments more secure is digital video surveillance equipment. And Seagate is a key player in that technology.

Dallmeier, a global leader in digital surveillance equipment based in Regensburg, Germany, uses Seagate hard drives to securely and quickly store high-quality video. Dallmeier’s security systems are used by customers such as Denmark’s Copenhagen Airport and the Las Vegas Sands Casino in Macau.

As a custom-designed OS, RTIK doesn’t suffer from the overhead, security problems and constant software patching endemic to general-purpose operating systems like Windows.

Making Air Travel Safer

Copenhagen Airport is a major transport hub that handles more than 21 million passengers annually and manages flights to 140 destinations worldwide; its security requirements are challenging.

The airport-security control room is equipped with Seagate hard drives, which store live or recorded pictures from the airport’s cameras. Those pictures can be quickly and easily accessed by security staff—much faster than they can be with analog systems.

While digital technology isn’t new, of course, lower prices for digital storage devices have made the technology more affordable, enabling more organizations to upgrade their surveillance systems. With digital recorders, security personnel have instant access to a computer file system that allows them to dictate which cameras to review, to zoom in on objects in a room and to specify the day and hour of the recording to replay.

And having lots of storage capacity means an end to the cassette-replacement cycles that can often lead to mistakes and hamper crime investigation.

A Safe Bet for Casino Security

In 2005, Dallmeier was asked to expand the original video surveillance system it had installed when the Las Vegas Sands Casino was first built in Macau (China). Today the casino uses a full digital system with 2000 video recorders that monitor the hotel, restaurant and 229,000 square feet of gaming space. The Dallmeier streaming servers and MPEG-2 recorders installed at the Las Vegas Sands make up one of the largest digital recording operations in the casino world.

Dallmeier also installs digital recording systems in other casinos worldwide to help security teams monitor the gaming floors for suspicious activity and to help catch cheats in action.

“Data is written to two Seagate hard drives by mirrored recording,” explains Reisinger. “The standard hard drive stores seven days’ worth of recording, while the second stores a day’s data and acts as an emergency backup. That means the current day’s data is always available, even if one of the hard drives fails.”

The close collaboration between Seagate and Dallmeier has been key to providing the right storage solutions for critical security needs. By listening proactively to customers, Seagate is able to understand their needs and provide products that add value to their business. The combined expertise and customer-focused approaches of Seagate and Dallmeier have resulted in customer satisfaction and success.

“Seagate hard drives have distinguished themselves with extremely high reliability.”